The Sticky Guy (One of Them Anyway) Says Stories Make Your Resume Sticky

Comments (0)

If it’s Friday, it must be “Fast Company columnist supports storytelling resumes” day. At last that has been the case the last two Fridays, and both times Thomas Clifford told me about the articles.

Last week it was Nick Corcodilos supporting storytelling in or instead of resumes.

MadetoStick.jpg Today, it’s Dan Heath, half of the Heath brothers team that authored Made to Stick, which in part talks about how stories make ideas “sticky.”

In a Fast Company article this week, Heath actually says it’s impossible to make resumes — with their bulleted format — into storytelling communications that stick. Instead, Heath says to use your cover letter to make your resume stick by telling sticky stories in it:

Make it your goal, in the cover letter, to do two things: (1) Give headlines; and (2) Defend the headlines with stories. For instance, if you’re applying for a job in retail consulting, a headline might be: I’m the right guy because I have experience mining data to find useful insights. But don’t stop there. Support the claim by telling a story from one of your past clients: “In a recent engagement, my team worked for a major supermarket chain that had issued ‘loyalty cards’ to its customers. It worried that these loyalty cards were not improving profits — that they were simply giving away discounts to customers who would have shopped there anyway. They wanted us to study whether they should drop the discount cards. It was my job to explore the data in a systematic way — I’d love to discuss the process with you — and what I found, in short, is that discontinuing them would have been a $100 million disaster.”

I completely agree that cover letters lend themselves to storytelling far better than do resumes. But about a third of hiring decision-makers don’t read cover letters.

Thus, I am far from giving up on the idea of the storytelling resume.

Leave a comment

About
A Storied Career

A Storied Career explores intersections/synthesis among various forms of
Applied Storytelling:
  • journaling
  • blogging
  • organizational storytelling
  • storytelling for identity construction
  • storytelling in social media
  • storytelling for job search and career advancement.
  • ... and more.
A Storied Career's scope is intended to appeal to folks fascinated by all sorts of traditional and postmodern uses of storytelling. Read more ...
Subscribe to A Storied Career in a Reader
Email Icon Subscribe to A Storied Career by Email

About
Dr. Kathy Hansen

Kathy Hansen, PhD, is a leading proponent of deploying storytelling for career advancement. She is an author and instructor, in addition to being a career guru. More...

emailicon.jpeg

Email me


EBooks
Free: Storied Careers: 40+ Story Practitioners Talk about Applied Storytelling

$2.99: Tell Me MORE About Yourself: A Workbook to Develop Better Job-Search Communication through Storytelling




Storytelling
Tweets in the
Twitterverse
« »

 


 

Pages

The following are sections of A Storied Career where I maintain regularly updated running lists of various items of interest to followers of storytelling:

TwitterStoryFollowList.jpg
story_events_small.jpg
story_wisdom_small.jpg
story_writings_smaller.jpg
storytellers_small.jpg
story_practitioners_small.jpg

Links below are to Q&A interviews with story practitioners.


The pages below relate to learning from my PhD program focusing on a specific storytelling seminar in 2005. These are not updated but still may be of interest:

January 2012

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31        

Shameless Plugs and Self-Promotion

Katharine Hansen
My Teaching Portfolio

KatharineHansenPhD.com

My PhD Page

 

twit8.png
Personal Twitter Account My personal Twitter account: @kat_hansen
Tweets below are from my personal account.
« »

AStoriedCareer Twitter account My storytelling Twitter account: @AStoriedCareer

KatCareerGal Twitter account My careers Twitter account: @KatCareerGal

 

View my page on
Worldwide Story Work

 

Kathy Hansen's Facebook profile

 

 

BlogNotionBadge

 

resume-writing service

 

Quintessential Careers

 

QuintZine

 

My Books

 

Cool Folks
to Work With

Find Your Way Coaching

 

 

career advice blogs member

 

Blogcritics: news and reviews

 

Geeky Speaky: Submit Your Site!

 


Storytelling Books